Caumsett, Late Afternoon, 4/14

I hiked about two miles to the beach at Caumsett, by which time it was already almost 6 p.m. The park closes at dusk which at this point in April is about 7:15. I figured that the hike back would take me a half hour and I didn't want to be stumbling around in the dark. So that didn't leave much time to paint. That meant that this was about forty minutes of painting.

Back at home I spent another hour to hour and a half finishing this. It's 11 by 14 inches, oil on linen.

America, where gimmicks trump genuine achievement

When people talk about artist Scott Wade's dirty pictures they are not referring to the salacious content but to his preferred medium, grimy car windshields. I have to admit this is an amusing idea, particularly when the subject is the reinterpretation of a renaissance masterpiece like Boticelli's Venus.

But browsing through his site, one eventually has to confront a question like this: Aside from the choice of medium, how good is he as an artist? In this country it sometimes appears that we value cleverness over actual achievement, wit over work.

Maybe Marshal McLuhan was right. The medium is the message.

Hands and arms

There is nothing better than working on that at which you are weakest. Hands? Noses? Ears? If they are a weak point it's good to hit the weakness head-on and work on it until it's no longer a weakness.

Marcello

From Saturday afternoon at the Art Students League in New York. A long pose, about an hour and 20 minutes.

Diana in the American Wing at the Met

Quick sketch. Kinda makes Diana look like she's standing on a stack of books, doesn't it. Oh well, a 15 minute sketch from the cafe in the enclosed courtyard there. Very relaxing spot.

'The Mourners' at the Met

In the group of artists with whom I associate, everybody is talking about the show of drawings by Bronzino at the Met. It is an unusual and perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime show that brings together all of the 70 or so drawings known by this artist.

OK, I did see the show but maybe I'm a bit jaded, or maybe it's because I've been looking at reproductions of many of these drawings for years. Maybe it was that stuffy, claustrophobic, dark room where the Met holds all of its drawing shows, but I was not as excited as I expected to be.

The show that DID excite me is on the first floor in the Met's Medieval Galleries and it's simply called "The Mourners." The mourners in question are a series of 37 or so alabaster sculptures created by Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier for the base of the tomb of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. They were created in the mid-15th century and most are in exquisite condition after 560 years.

Part of the charm experienced when viewing these sculptures is that they are each only about 16 inches tall. Another part of the magic is the dramatic manner in which the Met has lit them. Follow this link to the Met's description the show and look for the further link there to the FRAME display online which will allow viewers to rotate each of these little masterpieces 360 degrees.

Saturday afternoon

No matter what else has gone on during the rest of the week, I know that on Saturday afternoon I can drop into a zen-like state as I try to render the human form as observed in the model's poses at the Art Students League. The League has been in operation since the 1870s and has occupied its current building since 1898. The studio where we draw is on the second floor across from the gallery. I was told that our second floor studio was used at one time by William Merritt Chase, among others. But the roster of students who've studied there is as impressive as the faculty.

James Lancel McElhinney teaches anatomy and drawing the human figure there and I've been working as his monitor for a couple of years now. For more info on the class and what it has to offer follow this link to our Facebook page.

Nobody doesn't like Banksy

OK, maybe Queen Elizabeth doesn't like Banksy. And maybe if you're the building landlord, depending on what image he puts on your wall, you might not like Banksy. But it's hard not to love the work of an anonymous graffiti artist who has this much wit and such a comprehensive command of potent imagery as this fellow has. The image above, done in New York City, is rumored to have been commissioned by the building owner.

His work is in a number of museums. Or was, anyway. In some, it only stayed for a couple of hours before the guards noticed that something new had been smuggled into the place and surreptitiously stuck on the wall.

Banksy is the nom de brush of a so-far-unidentified British graffiti artist who is believed to be male and born about 1974. His renderings can be witty and edgy commentaries on our consumer culture but they can just as easily be damning political commentary. They are never mundane.

Executed quickly with the aid of large-scale, pre-cut stencils and a limited palette of spray-paint colors, Banksy's works, when they can be removed or pried loose from their building exteriors, have sometimes commanded sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though it's not clear that the artist himself realizes any of that profit.

Soon we'll get to see a film made with his co-operation. Exit Through the Gift Shop is scheduled for release, Spring, 2010.

There's a link to his own web-site here, which includes the trailer for the movie, graffiti he has posted around the world and photos of Banksy art in museums.

Channeling Vermeer

The painter Jonathan Janson does an amazing job channeling the spirit of Jan Vermeer in the creation of his nonetheless rather contemporary paintings. (His website here.)

You might be surprised to know that Janson is not shy about sharing the secrets of painting like this old master. His website offers discs and a book on how to imitate the working method and technique of the 17th century Delft painter. The book is a very worthy effort, but like a lot of self-published books it suffers terribly from a lack of editing. (The copy I bought has substantial groups of pages that were cut and pasted to reappear in other places in the book as if Janson was not quite sure where they really belonged.) Nonetheless, his gist of the method is reasonably presented and very workable for the average painter.

Janson's affection for Vermeer goes even further in his highly developed website, the Essential Vermeer, which includes a number of quite useful devices seldom encountered on the internet, like a scale comparison of each of Vermeer's paintings and a thorough discussion of Vermeer's probable use of the camera obsucra.

Lucian Freud, a shy painter speaks

What looks like a fascinating film about Lucian Freud will be released next week in Paris to coincide with the artist's birthday. Called The God of Small Things, Lucian Freud Captured on Film was put together by Tim Meara. There is a trailer for the film that one can see on the website, Painting Perceptions, maintained by Larry Groff, here.

Groff has also put up an extensive and thoughtful multi-part video interview that will provide considerable insight into the work of this artist, whom Robert Hughes called "our greatest living painter." The normally shy and somewhat reclusive Freud was filmed in 1988 for that interview.

More pine cones

For reasons described in an earlier post, I have a thing for pine cones. Readers will also know that I have a similar sort of affection for sea shells, loose feathers and odd rocks.

Here is a larger painting, 30 x 36 inches, oil on Belgian linen. I did this a year ago looking at pine cones and the shadows they cast in the sunlight through a nearby window. I liked the way the pine cones and thier shadows seemed to dance in a line against the sunlight.

The painting is titled, "Bear Mountain Boogie Woogie."

Re-evaluation

Above is a painting I did almost three years ago. Oil on linen, 9 x 12 inches. I didn't think much of it at the time but came across it recently and, looking at it fresh, felt better about it. My wife, Renee, does not care for the odd assemblage of subject matter, but when I did it I was thinking about how much I admired the work of mid-20th century artist and art director Walter Murch.

Murch did some wonderful paintings that one might call industrial still-life. As an illustrator he did covers for magazines like Fortune. In his fine art, Murch was not afraid to combine disparate objects into a painting that left people wondering what the odd combination meant. His seemed to be a representational artist's response in the conversation about surrealism.

By the light which defines them

My father used to pick up pine cones while he hiked looking for birds. I don't know what recommended certain pine cones for transport back to our house. Among the thousands along his path a few came back and tended to end up on dresser tops and mantle pieces. I will admit to being partial to them in the same way.

He also picked up the odd bird feather, stone or seashell. All that looking at the ground for things to pick up, it's a wonder he ever saw the birds he claimed to be looking for. Maybe his neck hurt from looking up in the sky so much and scanning the ground below was a nice change of pace.

Carnival in Web World

Alan Taylor, a web developer for Boston.com, has assembled a really beautiful collection of 39 photos from around the world, centered on the theme of Carnival. The costumes are astounding, the exuberance is contagious and the photography is mesmerizing. And, no, they're not all from Rio. See the photos in large format, here.

Quiz

How much art history do you know? Can you recognize and correctly identify 25 self-portraits by famous artists of the past? Here's a fun quiz created by Artists Online. Click the link, here. On the site you can roll your mouse over the image of an individual painting for an identification. (Full disclosure: I got 22 of 25 correct.)

I'm never sure whether our model, Cathy, is dozing or just peering through those squinty eyes. If I were her, holding a pose like this all afternoon, I know I'd be dozing.

She is the daughter of one of the original Disney animators and grew up in California. At a fairly young age she was posing for the animators doing the sequential poses they required to put together first generations of cartoons.

She's also done voice-over work for animation as well. She joins a long list of notable models at the Art Students League in New York. Models that reportedly included, at various times, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston and Madonna. I believe Kevin Bacon modeled here as well at one point.

Most, however, are not famous. But, New York being New York, the job has attracted a great many actors and dancers who could use an income between jobs.

Work in progress

This is a bit larger than I have been working. It's 24 x 20 inches and it's a gallery wrap canvas. I don't know why I got that kind of canvas. While I do like the thickness and substantial heft of the gallery wrap, it's a pain in the butt to frame.

The subject is my 26 year old son, a sergeant, crew chief and flight instructor in the Army. He joined the Army in July of 2001, just months before 9/11.

He has served in South Korea and Iraq as well as Fairbanks, Alaska. He's escorted Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and various other generals and dignitaries at various times. He lives and breathes Blackhawk helicopters.

I am grateful that Peter returned in one piece from 15 months in one of Iraq's deadliest cities. I think he is grateful for that as well.

Over Christmas my wife and I visited him and our daughter-in-law in Virgina where he is now stationed. After postings in Kirkuk, Iraq and Fairbanks, Alaska, it's nice to have him a little closer to home. This summer he and Amanda are planning a trip to Niagara Falls during which they'll spend some time with us here on Long Island.

6th of 7 Portraits

Has it really been this long since my last post?

This is the sixth of seven portraits for 'The Portrait Project.' Our committment to each other was that each of the seven of us would paint a self-portrait and portraits of at least two others in the group. We agreed to reassess the project at the one-year mark which is coming up in the next month. By completing the portrait of Myung-ja, above, I've done six. That leaves just Kurt Tatum whose image I have started and moved along, not quite to the half-way point.